Public Policy Process
WEEK 2: GOALS OF PUBLIC POLICY
Copyright 2010 Thomas A. Birkland
Announcements
 Next week: some library and research pointers
 Please email me if you like with pointers
 Two blogs you might want to know about
 www.disasterandsociety.blogspot.com
 http://thepolicyprocess.blogspot.com/ (very much in its
infancy)
 Initial memos – good, but reminders!
 National problem
 Where in an agency will you work
 Link to the agency (better yet, the unit in the agency)
This Session’s Objectives
 Understand the rationale and underlying logic in
Stone’s book.
 Understand how people define policy goals
 Understand how people behave in expounding goals
Copyright 2010 Thomas A. Birkland
Stone’s Underlying Logic
 Early policy scholarship assumed that policy
making should be rational in economic terms,


―The new field of policy science, supposedly devoted to
improving governance, was based on a profound disgust
for the ambiguities and paradoxes of politics. By and
large, the new science dismissed politics as an
unfortunate obstacle to clear-headed, rational analysis
and good policy (which were the same thing).‖ (pp. x-xi)
If this were true, how should policy be made?
 Politics is full of ambiguity and paradoxes
 Paradoxes derive from what politics is
 There is a difference between economic and
political logic, as we will see
 Politics matters in anything like a democracy
What paradoxes does Stone want to explain?
 Why policy making appears ―irrational‖
 Why political science so prizes ―rationality‖ at the
expense of better theories of how the policy process
works.
The Market and the Polis
 How can we model the ways societies organize to act
politically?
 We will go through this because I want you to
understand the important features of her argument.
Assumptions of a Market
 At least two willing participants
 Perfect information
 Costs and benefits (negative and positive




externalities) accounted for in pricing
Transitive utility ordering
Mutual gain from transactions
Net gains to a society from the sum of these
transactions
Is this how politics really works?
Problems with the market model
 Sum of individual benefits ≠ societal benefits
 Politics and policy making is often not voluntary
 Many claims to coercion
 Coercion depends on point of view
 There is rarely good information available to all in
politics (or in markets, actually)

Information is actually strategically manipulated (hidden).
 Markets don’t need communities—politics does
Political Community
 Community
 Cooperation
 Coercion
 Membership
 Loyalty
 Passion
Features of a Political Community
 Public Interest

Whether it exists or not, the public interest is important because
people believe it is.
 Commons Problems

Actions with private benefits that entail social costs, or social benefits
that require private sacrifices
 Influence

People are subject to influence, and are not just utility maximizing
actors
 Cooperation

People have to cooperate in political systems of greater than 2
people; markets don’t require cooperation except at the point of
exchange.
Features of a Political Society
 Loyalty
 In the market, each transaction is assumed to be a unique, one-shot event
 Involves friends, commitments, longer term relationships between people and
groups.
 Groups
 Work through loyalty and influence
 Information
 In the market, assumed to be ―perfect‖ and open
 In the polis, assumed not to be in the open—groups try to find and discredit some
information, while profiting from other information.
 Passion
 Authority and interest grow with use
 In the market, resources shrink
 Power
 Derived from all other features
 Exists to subordinate individual interests to group interests
Copyright 2010 Thomas A. Birkland
Concepts of Society
Market Model
Polis Model
1. Unit of Analysis
Individual
Community
2. Motivations
self-interest
Public interest (as well as
self interest)
3. Chief Conflict
Self-interest vs.. self-interest Self-interest vs.. public
interest (commons
problems)
4. Source of people’s ideas
and preferences
Self-generation within the
individual
Influences from outside
5. Nature of collective
activity
Competition
Cooperation and
competition
Concepts of Society
Market Model
Polis Model
6. Criteria for individual
decision-making
Maximizing self-interest;
minimizing cost
Loyalty (to people, places,
orgs., products); maximize
self-interest, promote public
interest.
7. Building blocks of social
action
Individuals
Groups and organizations
8. Nature of information
Accurate, complete, fully
available
Ambiguous, interpretive,
incomplete, strategically
manipulated
Concepts of Society
Market Model
Polis Model
9. How things work
Laws of matter (e.g..,
material resources are
finite and diminish with use
Laws of passion (e.g..,
human resources are
renewable and expand with
use).
10. Sources of Change
Material exchange
Ideas, persuasion, alliances
Pursuit of power, pursuit of
own welfare, pursuit of public
interest.
Quest to maximize own
welfare
Reminder: What is Stone’s Point?
 The policy sciences were established to be practical
 A practical science was grounded in economics
 Economics assumes rationality
 Thus, the Rationality Project
 But people and societies do not behave the way that
economists and ―rationalists‖ would argue
 What are the problems with Stone’s argument?
Copyright 2010 Thomas A. Birkland
Goals
16
Deborah Stone's four goals of public policy
 Equity or Equality
 Efficiency
 Security
 Liberty
Equality
 There are different kinds of equality
 These are based on
 The recipients of a public good
 The item that is being distributed
 And the process by which the thing is distributed
 The examples are laid out in the book—the division
of the cake
 The essential point: everyone believes in equity, but
not everyone agrees to its definition
Efficiency
 What is efficiency?
―Getting the most output for a given input‖
 ―Achieving an objective for the lowest cost‖

 Efficiency is not an end goal; it is a means to an end

Yet, we often hear calls for ―more efficiency‖
 It’s also normative

―Efficient organizations are ones that get things done with a
minimum of waste, duplication, and expenditure of resources‖
 It is very difficult to measure efficiency in the public
sector or in politics in general. Why?


Inputs
Outputs
Efficiency as a universal goal
 Like equity and cake slices: Who’s opposed to
efficiency?
 Yet, we have to answer three questions to measure
―efficiency‖



Who gets the benefits or bears the costs?
How should we measure values and costs?
What mode of organization yields efficiency?
Efficiency and the Library Example
 The set-up: an efficient library is about books
 Challenges:
 Is a library about books? Or about lectures, story telling,
electronic resources like the internet, jobs for teens?
 What constitutes a ―good book?
More challenges
 Libraries provide
 Employment
 Avenues for upward mobility
 Benefits beyond jobs
 Reading
 Ad hoc day care
 Help with teachers and homework
 Opportunity costs
 Time efficiency: big staff = less waiting
 Ease of use (multiple books?)
The result….
 ―Trying to define efficiency is like trying to pull
oneself out of quicksand without a rope.‖
 Objectives, definition, and criteria are politically
defined, not economically defined.
 Efficiency is an ideal, but is not always the goal
 Remember: our constitutional order is purposefully
inefficient
The Market as the Paragon of Efficiency
 There are many calls for privatizing government
 We often hear calls to run government like a
business.
 Knowing what you know about the market and polis,
why are these ideas unrealistic?
 Does the market always yield societal beneficial
outcomes?
Market failure
 Governments have to step in when markets fail; i.e.,
when these assumptions lead to allocative
inefficiency or gross inequity
 Examples




Correction of monopoly
Correction of problems of information
Problems of impacts on people who are not making the
exchange.
Failure to provide collective goods (national defense, police)
Thus, government is often involved in
 Alleviating the inefficiencies of the market
 Providing goods inefficiently because there is no
market way to do so
 Imposing requirements for equity on the market,
thereby introducing inefficiency.
Government cannot run like a business
 It is not a firm in a market
 It engages in those activities that are not profitable
by definition
 It is difficult to measure inputs and outputs in
government
 One person’s efficiency may be the next person’s
gross inequity

Example: The current Wake schools controversy
 But, the operation of government can often be more
efficient

But at what cost?
The equality-efficiency tradeoff
 Equality = inefficiency because it reduces incentives
to succeed

Untrue—look at income distribution data (page 82)
 Equality = inefficiency because it interferes with
individual behavior that yields innovation

Not necessarily—what benefit would have been derived from
that extra tax dollar?
 Equality = inefficiency because of administration
 But calling something ―administrative‖ is not prima facie
evidence of waste
Is There An Equality-Efficiency Trade-off?
Yes
No
Maintaining equality eliminates
people’s motivation to work
People are motivated to work by
inherent satisfactions, self-esteem, and
sense of belonging.
Maintaining equality requires
government interference with
individual choice, and free choice is
necessary for exchanges to produce
efficiency.
Redistribution does not stifle
experimentation and innovation; some
security is a stimulus to work and risktaking.
Maintaining equality requires a large
bureaucracy and bureaucracy equals
waste.
Administration is a productive activity
in itself.
A trade-off between equity and
efficiency is inevitable.
Society can have both equity and
efficiency by managing political and
policy choices.
Ideas on Security
 People broadly believe in helping
those in need
 But the definition of help and in
need is remarkably controversial
 One cannot simply count up things
and arrive at a needs assessment
 Dimensions of need




Absolute
Relative
Direct versus instrumental needs
(education, for example)
Protection from risks
Complications of the ―Biological‖ Definition of
Need
Dimension
Issue
1. Valuation of resources
In assessing needs, should we count only material
use of resources or also symbolic meanings and
satisfactions provided by resources?
2. Standard of comparison
Should we measure needs according to a fixed
(absolute) standard or a relative one (how people’s
resources compare to those of other members of the
community)?
3. Purposes of resources
Should we provide only resources that meet
immediate, direct needs for survival, or also
resources that enable people to fulfill broader
goals?
4. Time
Should society secure only people’s current needs
or also provide protection against future needs and
risks of harm?
5. Unit of analysis
Should society secure only the needs of people as
separate individuals were also people’s relational
needs (such as dignity, a sense of belonging, trust,
and community)?
Ideas on liberty
 People are free to unless their actions cause some sort of
harm to others
 This idea derives from J.S. Mill’s ―On Liberty‖
 This freedom is negative freedom, meaning that
government should just let people do what they want and
leave them alone
 But what does harm mean?


No one is free to physically harm another person
But what about other types of harms?
Accidents
 Pollution
 Mistakes

Nonphysical harms
 Material affects: impact on wealth or well-being
 Amenity affects: impact on quality of life, such as




billboards, destruction of wildlife
Emotional and psychological effects
Spiritual and moral harms
How could a market monetize these harms and build
them into price systems?
Is a market the best place to address harms?
Liberty and Obligations to the Polis
 Thus, there are harms that are not done to
individuals, but are done to the community



Structural harms: damage to the ability of the community to
function as a community
Accumulative harms: harms if everybody starts doing it, like
cutting across lawns, sewage dumping, jaywalking
Harms to a group that result from harms to individuals: racial
discrimination, for example
Tradeoffs Between Liberty and Security
 The problem of dependence
 If we provide economic security to the poor and the
unemployed, do we grant them security at the cost of their
liberty?
If we value liberty, we place security in the hands of the family or
household, thereby eliminating government intrusion
 If we value security, we make this a government function, thereby
possibly limiting liberty
 But what if security makes people freer?

The Liberty/Equality Tradeoff
 People have different talents, skills etc.--thus,
government should equalize those resources that
allow people to make the most of their talents.
 This is positive liberty

Positive liberty is not a key part of our political culture.
Negative liberty—freedom to
 Positive liberty—freedom from (a lot like security)

Linkages and Summary
 All of these things we discussed are posited as goals




in our society
Yet, all of these concepts are deeply contested in our
society
Do these tradeoffs really exist?
There is no optimal tradeoff
We have a political process through which we can
address these apparent tradeoffs and challenging
problems.
Copyright 2010 Thomas A. Birkland